Private Games (9 page)

While the bar at the Savoy Hotel along the Strand was about glamour, the Lobby Bar was about money. One Aldwych was close to London’s legal and financial districts, and exuded enough corporate elegance to make it a magnet for thirsty bankers, flush traders, and celebrating deal-makers.

There were forty or fifty such patrons in the bar, but Knight spotted Richard Guilder, Marshall’s business partner, almost immediately: a corpulent, silver-haired boar of a man in a dark suit, sitting at the bar alone, his shoulders and head hunched over.

‘Let me do the talking at first,’ Knight said.

‘Why?’ Pope snapped. ‘Because I am a woman?’

‘How many allegedly corrupt tycoons have you chatted up lately on the sports beat?’ he asked her coolly.

The reporter grudgingly made a show of letting him lead the way.

Marshall’s partner was staring off into the abyss. Two fingers of neat Scotch swirled in the crystal tumbler he held. To his left, a bar stool stood empty. Knight started to sit on it.

Before he could, an ape of a man in a dark suit got in the way.

‘Mr Guilder prefers to be alone,’ he said in a distinct Brooklyn accent.

Knight showed him his identification. Guilder’s bodyguard shrugged, and showed Knight his. Joe Mascolo worked for Private New York.

‘You in as backup for the Games?’ Knight asked.

Mascolo nodded. ‘Jack called me over.’

‘Then you’ll let me talk to him?’

The Private New York agent shook his head. ‘Man wants to be alone.’

Knight said loud enough for Guilder to hear: ‘Mr Guilder? I’m sorry for your loss. I’m Peter Knight, also with Private. I’m working on behalf of the London Organising Committee, and for my mother, Amanda Knight.’

Mascolo looked furious that Knight was trying to work around him.

But Guilder stiffened, turned in his seat, studied Knight and then said, ‘Amanda. My God. It’s …’ He shook his head and wiped away a tear. ‘Please, Knight, listen to Joe. I’m not in any condition to talk about Denton at the moment. I am here to mourn him. Alone. As I imagine your dear mother is doing, too.’

‘Please, sir,’ Knight began again. ‘Scotland Yard—’

‘Has agreed to talk with him in the morning,’ Mascolo growled. ‘Call his office. Make an appointment. And leave the man in peace for the evening.’

The Private New York agent glared at Knight. Marshall’s partner was turning back to his drink, and Knight was growing resigned to leaving him alone until the next morning when Pope said, ‘I’m with the
Sun
, Mr Guilder. We received a letter from Denton Marshall’s killer. He mentions you and your company and justifies murdering your partner because of certain illegal activities that Marshall and you were alleged to have been involved in at your place of business.’

Guilder swung around, livid. ‘How dare you! Denton Marshall was as honest as the day is long. He was never, ever involved in anything illegal during all the time I knew him. And neither was I. Whatever this letter says, it’s a lie.’

Pope tried to hand the financier photocopies of the documents that Cronus had sent her, saying, ‘Denton Marshall’s killer alleges that these were taken from Marshall & Guilder’s own records – or, to be more precise, your firm’s
secret
records.’

Guilder glanced at the pages but did not take them, as if he had no time for considering such outrageous allegations. ‘We have never kept secret records at Marshall & Guilder.’

‘Really?’ Knight said. ‘Not even about foreign currency transactions made on behalf of your high-net-worth clients?’

The hedge fund manager said nothing, but Knight swore that some of the colour had seeped from his florid cheeks.

Pope said, ‘According to these documents, you and Denton Marshall were pocketing fractions of the value of every British pound or US dollar or other currency that passed across your trading desks. It may not sound like much, but when you’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds a year the fractions add up.’

Guilder set his tumbler of scotch on the bar, doing his best to appear composed. But Knight could have sworn that he saw a slight tremor in the man’s hand as it returned to rest on Guilder’s thigh. ‘Is that all the killer of my best friend claims?’

‘No,’ Knight replied. ‘He says that the money was moved to offshore accounts and funnelled ultimately to members of the Olympic Site Selection Committee before their decision in 2007. He says that your partner bribed London’s way into the Games.’

The weight of the allegation seemed to throw Guilder. He looked both befuddled and wary, as if he’d suddenly realised he was far too drunk to be having this conversation.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that’s not … Please, Joe, make them go.’

Mascolo looked torn but said, ‘Leave him be until tomorrow. I’m sure that if we call Jack he’s going to tell you the same thing.’

Before Knight could reply there was a noise like a fine crystal wine glass breaking. The first bullet pierced a window on the west side of the bar. It just missed Guilder and shattered the huge mirror behind the bar.

Knight and Mascolo both realised what had happened. ‘Get down!’ Knight yelled, going for his gun, and scanning the windows for any sign of the shooter.

Too late. A second round was fired through the window. The slug hit Guilder just below his sternum with a sound like a pillow being plumped.

Bright red blood bloomed on the hedge fund manager’s starched white shirt and he collapsed forward, upsetting a champagne bucket as he fell and crashed to the pale marble floor.

IN THE STUNNED
silence that now briefly seized the fabled Lobby Bar, the shooter, an agile figure in black motorcycle leathers and visor helmet, spun away and jumped off the window ledge to flee.

‘Someone call an ambulance,’ Pope yelled. ‘He’s been shot!’

The bar erupted into pandemonium as Joe Mascolo vaulted over his prone client and bulled forward, ignoring the patrons screaming and diving for cover.

Knight was two feet behind the Private New York operator when Mascolo jumped over a glass cocktail table and up onto the back of a plush grey sofa set against the bar’s west wall. As Knight tried to climb up beside Mascolo, he saw to his surprise that the American was armed.

Gun laws in the UK were very strict. Knight had had to jump through two years of hoops in order to get his licence to carry a firearm.

Before he could think any more about it, Mascolo shot through the window. The gun sounded like a cannon in that marble and glass room. Real hysteria swept the bar now. Knight spotted the shooter in the middle of the cul-de-sac on Harding Street, face obscured but plainly a woman. At the sound of Mascolo’s shot she twisted, dropped and aimed in one motion, an ultra-professional.

She fired before Knight could and before Mascolo could get off another round. The bullet caught the Private New York agent through the throat, killing him instantly. Mascolo dropped back off the sofa and fell violently through the glass cocktail table.

The shooter was aiming at Knight now. He ducked, raised his pistol above the sill and pulled the trigger. He was about to rise when two more rounds shattered the window above him.

Glass rained down on Knight. He thought of his children and hesitated a moment before returning fire. Then he heard tyres squealing.

Knight rose up to see the shooter on a jet-black motorcycle, its rear tyre smoking and laying rubber in a power drift that shot her around the corner onto the Strand, heading west and disappearing before Knight could shoot.

He cursed, turned and looked in shock at Mascolo, for whom there was no hope. But he heard Pope cry: ‘Guilder’s alive, Knight! Where’s that ambulance?’

Knight jumped off the couch and ran back through the shouting and the gathering crowd towards the crumpled form of Richard Guilder. Pope was kneeling at his side amid a puddle of champagne and a mass of blood, ice and glass.

The financier was breathing in gasps and holding tight to his upper stomach while the blood on his shirt turned darker and spread.

For a moment, Knight had an unnerving moment of déjà vu, seeing blood spreading on a bed sheet. Then he shook off the vision and got down next to Pope.

‘They said there’s an ambulance on the way,’ the reporter said, her voice strained. ‘But I don’t know what to do. No one here does.’

Knight tore off his jacket, pushed aside Guilder’s hands and pressed the coat to his chest. Marshall’s partner peered at Knight as if he might be the last person he ever saw alive, and struggled to talk.

‘Take it easy, Mr Guilder,’ Knight said. ‘Help’s on the way.’

‘No,’ Guilder grunted softly. ‘Please, listen …’

Knight leaned close to the financier’s face and heard him whisper a secret hoarsely before paramedics burst into the Lobby Bar. But as Guilder finished his confession he just seemed to give out.

Blood trickled from his mouth, his eyes glazed, and he slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.

A FEW MINUTES
later, Knight stood on the pavement outside One Aldwych, oblivious to patrons hurrying past him to the restaurants and theatres. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of the wailing ambulance speeding Guilder and Mascolo to the nearest hospital.

He remembered standing on another pavement late at night almost three years before, watching a different ambulance race away from him, its siren’s fading cry accompanying a feeling of misery that still had not lifted entirely for him.

‘Knight?’ Pope said. She’d come up behind him.

He blinked and noticed the double-decker buses braking and taxis honking and people hurrying home all around him. Suddenly he felt disjointed in much the same way that he had on that long-ago night when he’d watched the other ambulance speed away from him.

London goes on, he thought. London always went on even in the face of tragedy and death, whether the victim was a corrupt hedge fund manager or a bodyguard or a young—

A pair of fingers appeared in front of his nose. They clicked and he looked round, startled. Karen Pope was looking at him in annoyance. ‘Earth to Knight. Hello?’

‘What is it?’ he snapped.

‘I asked you if you think Guilder will make it?’

Knight shook his head. ‘No. I felt his spirit leave him.’

The reporter looked at him sceptically. ‘What do you mean, you felt it?’

Knight sighed softly before replying: ‘That’s the second time in my life I’ve had someone die in my arms, Pope. I felt it the first time, too. That ambulance might as well slow down. Guilder is as dead as Mascolo is.’

Pope’s shoulders sank a little and there was a brief awkward silence before she said, ‘I’d better be going back to the office. I’ve got a nine o’clock deadline.’

‘You should include in your story that Guilder confessed to the currency fraud just before he died,’ Knight said.

‘He did?’ Pope said, digging in her pocket for her notebook. ‘What’d he say, exactly?’

‘He said that the scam was his, and that the money did not go to any member of the Olympic Site Selection committee. It went to his personal offshore accounts. Marshall was innocent. He died a victim of Guilder’s scheming.’

Pope stopped writing, her scepticism back. ‘I don’t buy that,’ she said. ‘He’s covering for Marshall.’

‘They were his last words,’ Knight shot back. ‘I believe him.’

‘You have a reason to, don’t you? It clears your mother’s late fiancé.’

‘It’s what he said,’ Knight insisted. ‘You have to include that in the story.’

‘I’ll let the facts speak for themselves,’ Pope said, ‘including what you say Guilder told you.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

‘We’re not going anywhere soon,’ Knight said, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Scotland Yard will want to talk with us, especially because there was gunfire. Meanwhile, I need to call Jack and fill him in, and then speak to my nanny.’

‘Nanny?’ Pope said, looking surprised. ‘You have kids?’

‘Twins. Boy and girl.’

Pope glanced at his left hand and said in a joking manner, ‘No ring. What, are you divorced? Drove your wife nuts and she left you with the brats?’

Knight gazed at her coldly, marvelling at her insensitivity, before saying, ‘I’m a widower, Pope. My wife died in childbirth. She bled to death in my arms two years, eleven months and two weeks ago. They took her away in an ambulance with the siren wailing just like that.’

Pope’s jaw sagged and she looked horrified. ‘Peter, I’m so sorry, I …’

But Knight already had his back turned and was walking along the pavement towards Inspector Elaine Pottersfield, who’d only just arrived.

DARKNESS FALLS ON
London, and my old friend hatred stirs at the thought that my entire life has all been a prelude to this fated moment, exactly twenty-four hours before the opening ceremony of the most hypocritical event on Earth.